


Dear James

by JaneSkazki



Category: Star Trek: The Original Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-20
Updated: 2020-02-20
Packaged: 2021-02-28 06:48:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22819528
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JaneSkazki/pseuds/JaneSkazki
Summary: Lt James Kirk is posted to a failing colony in the back of beyond. Adult-ish content.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 8





	Dear James

**Author's Note:**

> This abuses the plot of a paperback book I fished out of a bargain bin at Woolworths, P.S Your Cat is Dead, by James Kirkwood. (No points for guessing why I picked that up). James Kirkwood is a great novelist and playwright, btw.
> 
> So then I discovered that the book was filmed in 2002 (by Steve Gutenberg, who took the lead role) and as a play, produced in several countries. So I guess taking it to the final frontier, somewhat amended, is okay. Thanks for your plot, Jimmy.
> 
> The book is definitely worth your time, and the film too, on a slow night.

Dear James

Lieutenant Kirk stared in horror at the Shuttlecraft _Charles R Schulz_. They’d landed it on what the colony grandiosely termed a ‘spacefield’, unloaded the cargo and gone for coffee in the transit terminal cafeteria. They’d secured it. He hadn’t left guards, because no one left a guard on a Starfleet shuttle. You couldn’t break into military vehicles with a pocket adinotronic transmitter and three turns of bailer twine, the way you could the second-hand load handlers his mother used to move stock and equipment around the family farm in Iowa.

Although he knew that, he ran his hand along the lip of the hatch to feel for the characteristic scratches on the finish. Somehow they had gotten inside.

“What’s fucked up now, Two-Shoes?” Berwick caught up to him, at last. While Kirk had been drinking coffee, his team of four had taken themselves off to another table and sat down with donuts and big glasses of soda. When he’d gone to round them up, and he’d realised it wasn’t soda at all, but beer, it was too late to do anything but yell at them and add another count to their already unmanageably long record of disciplinary offences. The other three were still idling across the tarmac, laughing raucously.

“God, what happened in here?” Berwick was standing right at Kirk’s shoulder, giving off an odour of beer and unlaundered velour uniform.

“You came back to get your communicator,” Kirk remembered.

“I didn’t do this.”

“Did you secure the shuttle again?”

“The fuck I did.” Berwick belched and rubbed his stomach. “Is that what I think it is?”

“If you think it’s a dead sheep, Berwick, then it’s what you think it is.” Kirk climbed inside, stepping carefully until the interior lights came up. There was no further carrion underfoot, only the sheep, and a message taped over the nav comp screen. ‘Baaaar.’ “Get it out of here.”

“Me? I’m not trained for hazardous waste.”

“Only because no garbage handler would take you,” Kirk said under his breath. “Get an environment suit out of the aft locker, if you’re that worried.” He untaped the message and fired up the shuttle’s main computer, setting status checks in motion. He came back into the main cabin and cast a regretful look at the dead animal, whose entrails were strewn along the centre aisle, wondering if it would demand an environment suit of its own before being handled by Berwick.

“...and then she lay down on the bed and did the fucking splits, I swear...”

“Hoffman, go fetch a trolley from the terminal.”

“Why?” The big Finn towered over Kirk, even standing on the running board below the shuttle’s hatch.

“That was an order.”

“I know it was a fucking order. Lassiter, Lieutenant Fucking Kirk wants a fucking trolley.”

Lassiter was skinny, with a thin, mean face, one eye set markedly higher than the other and a perpetual expression of sour indifference. He turned and trudged back the way he’d just come. It wasn’t exactly regulation, but ordering Hoffman to do something, so that the petty officer could get some kind of kick out of ordering Lassiter to do it in his place, worked. If things worked, Kirk might, just, get off this planet before he filled a bathtub, climbed in and slit his own wrists.

“It’s a bloody sheep!”

‘Today, children, we’re going to learn to name farm animals,’ Kirk thought. Archer was the last of his division of Starfleet’s finest, an Englishman of such bland appearance, it was hard to imagine him doing anything horrible enough to justify his presence on this hell-on-a-planet: Isidora III, an M class world circling a sun named after a beautiful woman, presumably by someone who hadn’t liked her very much. Kirk sat down heavily in a seat as far away from the sheep as possible.

“There’s a bloody sheep in the shuttle!”

“Mister Archer, when Mister Berwick has removed the sheep, you will clean the deck. You will find the materials you need in locker number three.” Kirk had initially thought that Archer’s crime was simple stupidity. In three weeks, he’d learned that the man was an evil genius who had crafted the mindless statement of the obvious into a weapon of attrition.

“God’s mother in a shopping trolley, a fucking sheep.” While waiting for Berwick to remove the animal, Archer dropped into the seat next to Kirk. “What next?”

The question was rhetorical and indifferent. Archer was the least moved by the petty atrocities aimed at the squad. He accepted them as he also accepted confinement to quarters, reductions in pay, suspension of leave, bad weather, body odour (his own and his colleagues’), Dear John letters ( his fiancée’s) and athlete’s foot (primarily Berwick’s, but generously shared courtesy of poor personal hygiene). All of these were surprising annoyances which he did not think he deserved, yet considered himself powerless to prevent.

“I’ll kill the little fuckers,” Berwick said, as he kicked the sheep down the steps to await transport to the terminal’s disposal facilities. Kirk supposed those facilities would be up to the challenge. The sheep must have been lying around on the tarmac, since ‘the little fuckers’ would hardly have bothered to carry it any distance. He moved away from Archer, on the pretence of looking out of the window.

It was nearly dark, but there wasn’t much to look at even by daylight. The colony on Isidora III was newish, small, and already failing. There weren’t the centres of population to justify high schools. While many, perhaps even most of the colonists, the adults at least, were working flat out to keep their project viable, an army of bureaucrats filtered off the meagre Federation subsidies into businesses owned by their families. At the same time, the entire planet’s teenage offspring were powering down their ‘personalised instruction software systems' and taking to the backwoods with their parents’ projectile weapons.

Kirk frowned as he caught sight of a shadowy figure vanishing behind another shuttle. He considered pursuing it. Then he thought about what had happened last time he’d come face to face with one of the tearaways, and realised he had absolutely no power to do anything except stand there and be insulted. He decided the movement was a figment of his imagination.

***

“Jimmy Kirk is awful tired.

His men don’t want to be inspired.

Don’t want to get their ass in gear.

Can’t suck up to no brass here.”

The song echoed off the metal cladding of the single storey barrack block as the squad marched away into the black night, perfectly, sarcastically, in step, perfectly in tune, homed in on the transit terminal cafeteria like so many cholesterol-seeking missiles. Kirk, according to his custom, turned towards his quarters, intending to shower, change into civilian clothing, and walk the extra half mile to Madame Polowski’s Polish Eating House. Madame Polowski didn’t take Starfleet ration vouchers, but that meant her good humour hadn’t been tested beyond breaking point by Berwick, Hoffman, Archer and Lassiter. Madame Polowski, almost alone among the colonists, behaved as if Starfleet personnel were sentient beings.

The lieutenant made his way through the shadows along the length of the block, avoiding the broken and uneven paving slabs, until he reached the door of his room. It stood ajar.

A wedge of sickly lemon light cleaved the darkness. A wilful movement of the night air rattled the screen door in its frame.

“The little fuckers...” Jim Kirk hissed under his breath. His quarters, his room. His sanctuary. “I just forgot to lock it this morning... please, let me just have forgotten to lock it this morning...”

He pushed the door open with a wary, extended forefinger. It groaned a mocking accompaniment to his despair.

The room was trashed. His closet had been gutted: twisted velour in prized gold spilled over the floor. The mirror over the desk was crazed. The bed had been knifed. Pillows and mattress shed white fibres. Books lay dismembered, on a carpet which squelched wetly, unpleasantly, under his boots. He could hear water running in the bathroom. He took only two steps inside, and stood there, letting his eyes catalogue the damage, the screaming absences of the few possessions which had marked the place as his. His computer, gone. A desk chronometer, gone. A good hairbrush, a gift from his mother, gone. A wooden bowl lent by Madame Polowski, originally filled from her yard with the local substitute for plums... not gone, although the tart fruit had been used as missiles and were decorating the wall opposite the door. The bowl still sat on the table by the window, where the sun would strike the fruit for the whole morning. Judging by their remains, the long awaited turning point in the fruit’s ripening cycle had been reached and passed shortly before the Little Fuckers' visit.

What else? Kirk wondered. He hadn’t left any valuables here, nothing worth taking for its own sake. The computer was ancient, its screen burned out almost to uniform grayness. His civilian clothes... He shrugged. There was never any reason to wear them on Isidora III. Even if the local girls hadn’t been sullen and thickset, he preferred pining for Ruth in solitude even to platonic female company.

Ruth.

Her picture had been beside his bed.

“Damn you!”

He hurried around the narrow cot, but the picture wasn’t on the floor on the far side. He backed out of the cul de sac between bed and closets, fists clenched. He could print another, but Ruth had given him the frame. It was worth a credit or two at most, sold on by one teenager to another. The picture was probably already discarded, blowing around the shuttle field in a hundred fragments. When it rained overnight, as it almost always did, the pieces would be pasted down on the tarmac, and Kirk would have to watch every step he took for fear of treading on his beloved.

“You little fuckers!” He spat the words out to stop a sudden rush of self-pity closing up his throat. “I’m going to kill you.”

He was standing by the window now, looking into the bathroom, where the handbasin was cascading water onto the floor. Ruth’s picture, still in the frame, was positioned on the edge of the basin. Something...

His throat and stomach clenched in concert, compressing a burning surge of acid nausea. A gobbet of thick, white fluid oozed down the glass, just now reaching the level of Ruth’s slightly open lips.

“You... little... “ He was going to kill them. He was going to track them down and crash the shuttle into their homes. No... He was going to hunt them down and pick them off one by one. No... He was going to... to... James Kirk’s eyes stalked the site of the atrocity, seeking inspiration, and found it. A phaser. He’d hunt them down with the phaser set to ‘seizure', a mythical position that wasn’t marked on the dial, because people weren’t supposed to know you could do it. It was too outrageous, it was too... too entirely suitable for the Little Fuckers. It was a setting that made a Klingon disruptor look like a rubber truncheon. If it existed, Kirk would find it.

He lunged for the phaser lying in the fruit bowl and swung it round, savouring the warm synthetic in the palm of his hand.

It was only then that he realised the phaser wasn’t his, wasn’t Starfleet issue. That it had no business being in his fruit bowl.

The goddammed adolescents on this goddammed planet were armed with goddammed phasers.

Perfect.

He had an excuse to go out there and kill them.

“I’m going to pull you out from your hiding places and burn your skin off one layer at a time.” He hit the safety catch and listened to the whine of the accumulating charge. “And then...”

“Okay! Okay! I will come out. Don’t shoot! Please, don’t shoot!”

For a moment, Kirk couldn’t make sense of what he was hearing. Then a foot, clad in a boot so worn the sole gleamed, kicked to get purchase on the coarse carpet. A second foot followed it out from under the bed. Bare ankles protruded from the rucked up legs of a pair of faded jeans. The legs started to roll, then discovered that there was nowhere near enough clearance under the bed frame. The knees bent and straightened, bent and straightened, as more denim pant legs, then a dark red flannel shirt, emerged little by little from under the bed. The process was so slow that Kirk was entirely over being surprised, and well back into incandescent rage, long before two hands with dirty, bitten nails reached out, gripped the metal frame and gave a final push.

Kirk leaned down, grabbed the back of the of the shirt collar, hauled the intruder to his feet and slammed him face first against the fruit-splattered wall. He thrust the phaser up against the narrow shoulders.

“Don’t shoot me! I’m going now!”

“What did you say?”

“I am going now! I am going when I heard you come back!”

“You’re going now?”

“Yes!”

“No, you’re not fucking going now, you piece of trash.”

“Let me go!” The kid kicked backwards at Kirk. A boot flew off. “Let me go, or I'll...”

“Or you'll what?” Kirk leaned forward, until his mouth was right by his captive’s ear. He whispered. “What will you do if I don’t let you go? Scream? I promise you, there are six people billeted in this barrack block, and I chose a room as far away from the other five as I could. But they’re in town right now.. No one is going to hear you.” Kirk smiled as he paused to let this information sink in. “Go on, if you want to. Scream.”

“I'll...”

He could almost hear the tumblers clicking over as the kid considered his options.

“I'll...”

“Shall I tell you what I’m going to do?”

He waited for a response.

“Take me to the police?” his prisoner suggested hurriedly. “No, please, don’t...”

“Believe me, you little fucker, in a few minutes, you’re going to be begging me to take you to the police.”

The boy swallowed. Their heads were so close together, Kirk could hear his epiglottis thud shut like a shuttle hatch.

“What shall I do with you? Hm. So many options. Hard to believe that five minutes ago, I was bored with this planet. Choices, choices.”

“You can let me go. I promise I will not come back.”

“Choice one,” Kirk said, straightening up, but still holding the kid’s face hard against the wall. He hitched his arm up a little, so that the boy was pulled up on his toes. Ragged nails scrabbled helplessly against the painted fibreboard. “Choice one, wave goodbye to you as you trot off down the path, before I spend a relaxing evening alone in my comfortable quarters. Well... I don’t know. Let’s think what else is on offer.” He jabbed the business end of the phaser into the boy’s neck. “Choice two. Set this phaser to the tightest possible beam and carve you up into a jigsaw puzzle before spending the evening seeing if I can be bothered to put you back together.”

That elicited a sharp intake of breath.

“But that would be messy. I'd hate to make a mess of my quarters.” He tossed the phaser onto the bed and changed hands, taking a new grip of collar and shirt front and turning the boy round so he could appreciate the irony of this statement. Two huge, scared, brown eyes gazed up at Kirk out of a white complexion. “Don’t you think it would be messy?”

The boy just stared.

Kirk shook him. “Answer me!”

“Yes!”

“Yes, Lieutenant Kirk, sir!”

“Please,” the boy said with a quiet intensity in sharp contrast to Kirk’s parade ground bawling. “Please, let me go.”

“Choice three. Since I don’t like my quarters to be this messy, I could make you clean up in here.”

He nodded furiously. “I will clean up. I can do that. I will clean everything.”

Kirk narrowed his eyes. That was too reasonable, too proportionate. “Oh, sorry. I meant, you’re going to clean up the mess anyway, and then we move on to choice three.” He shook the miserable bundle that hung from his fist. “What do you think choice three is?”

The boy opened and closed his mouth like a spectacularly stupid fish.

“Come on. Make a suggestion!”

“Are you going to... to... to kill me?”

“What do you think?”

A classically perfect tear emerged in the corner of the boy’s right eye, grew large, sagged and rolled down the side of his nose.

“Come on, little fucker, I want ideas.”

“You could... you could call my mother.”

Kirk started to laugh. “Your mother! You think I’m going to call your mother!”

And then suddenly he was listening to the sound of his own laughter, and it was a deeply unpleasant sound, like a hyena. He stopped as abruptly as he’d begun. The room was silent. For a moment, neither of them even seemed to be breathing.

“You’re going to kill me.”

The kid’s final ‘g’s all sounded hard, like ‘k’s. ‘Goink to kill me.’

Kirk was suddenly reminded of Madame Polowski, and of how hungry he was, and tired. He was too tired and hungry to decide what he was going to do with his prisoner now.

Scooping up the phaser once more, he released his grip on the flannel shirt and dropped the kid to the floor where he scrambled back to his feet and was half way to the door before Kirk could say, “Move another centimetre, and you’re dead.”

He froze. Kirk’s spirit’s soared. Obedience! Instant, unquestioning obedience! If only he could turn a phaser on his platoon!

“Stand up straight.”

The boy obeyed.

Kirk leaned down, without looking, and ripped a length of flex away from the wall. The lamp it was attached to hit the floor and broke. The boy flinched. The ceramic base swung from the end of the flex as Kirk tucked the phaser into his armpit, pulled the boy round to face him and tied his wrists. Automatically, he checked the bonds weren’t tight enough to do permanent damage. Then he released the phaser, catching it in his free hand as it fell. He jerked the boy’s arms up over his head and held them up, while pushing firmly on the boy’s back, round to the closets. He pulled open a door and looked down at the crumpled clothes that littered the floor.

“Hm.” It took a couple of minutes, one handed and juggling the phaser, to free a belt from a pair of pants. He used it to strap the boy’s ankles together. A sleeve ripped from a shirt linked the flex to the belt and effectively limited the kid’s scope for manoeuvre. The closet door was solid, and it shut with a satisfyingly inarguable thud. To be on the safe side, Kirk wedged a chair under the latch.

'Choice three...' Kirk pondered. It irritated him to have run out of ideas so soon. He needed food. And alcohol. With his stomach filled and his inhibitions anaesthetised, he’d soon have ideas to spare.

***

Lieutenant Kirk wasn’t sure if the music was Polish, but ancient analogue recordings of long dead pianists were the heartbeat of Madame Polowski’s Eating House. The rustle of the red and white checked table cloths as the owner moved between the tightly packed tables, the dull clink of thick, translucent tumblers, the scrape the heavy metal tableware made on the dulled, stained glaze of the white ceramic plates... Even the woman in a red and black floral headscarf, sobbing quietly at a corner table, was simply a part of the soundscape.

“Lieutenant James!” Madame Polowski cried, hastening out from behind her tiled counter with her arms spread to embrace him. “You are late tonight. We were worried!”

Kirk smiled wanly and allowed himself to be kissed on both cheeks and smothered in an excess of bosom. His hours were irregular, and he was actually earlier than he’d planned to be.

“Soup for the lieutenant!” Madame commanded, and then, because she had no staff in the evenings, she gestured him grandly towards his usual table and headed to the kitchen and the simmering pots.

He nodded politely to the weeping woman as he skirted her table, picked up a flimsiplast of the colony’s daily newspaper from the rack on the wall and seated himself in his own accustomed place near to the window. There were only half a dozen diners in the restaurant, which majored on serving lunch to the terminal’s admin staff. As a matter of course, they all behaved as if none of the others existed. Kirk knew, courtesy of six weeks of whispered commentary from Madame, that the bald men sitting with their backs to each other at opposite sides of the room were twin brothers who hadn’t spoken for nearly five years, and that the white haired woman picking bones from a badly filleted fish was senior partner in the colony’s only legal practice, while the two young men with scrawny necks eating boiled potatoes and fat bacon were her clerks. He knew from the obscene commentaries of his men that his second in command, Ensign Gregory Duval, claimed to have slept with the four daughters of the two brothers, the girlfriends of the clerks and the beautiful but crippled sister of the lawyer.

Kirk turned the flimsi over and spread it flat on the stained wooden table top. He tapped it impatiently to display in Standard. “Governor tells Starfleet to bugger off,” the headline proclaimed.

His eyes slid down the page. ‘Juvenile crime wave — Governor gets tough.’

He prayed briefly that he would be summoned this evening to the gubernatorial mansion, and requested to assist the colony’s police in instituting a shoot to kill policy for out-of-control teenagers, but as he speed read the article, he sighed. The Governor was proposing to impose a levy on property insurance premiums, to cover the cost of police time ‘wasted’ issuing crime references for instances of theft and criminal damage.

Kirk frowned as this prompted other complications to rise up and draw attention to themselves. Could he claim from Starfleet for the damage to his property? And what about the damage to his quarters? He’d have to organise repairs himself. And then work out how he was supposed to recover the cost.

Some lard-ass back on Earth would probably tell him to claim the cost back from the Colony authorities. And he knew what the Governor’s response would be.

“B...”

He swallowed the expletive as Madame slid a tin tray onto his table. A golden lens of fat swam in the centre of his soup. “I can’t talk with you about your day, Lieutenant James,” she said in an undertone as she lifted the soup bowl onto the faded cotton placemat. She jerked her thumb towards the weeping woman. “Maria is almost hysterical.” She paused to allow him to ask for details.

Kirk nodded and took a large spoonful of soup. He gulped it down, already charging the next to minimise talking time. “That’s okay, ma’am.”

She scowled. “Her son never calls her.”

He swallowed again. “That’s terrible.”

“I’m sure you call your mother, Lieutenant James.”

Kirk nodded earnestly at his soup. The simple fact was that he couldn’t bear to call his mother, or Ruth, or anyone, from this place. He couldn’t bear to admit he was here.

“You can tell me about your day later, perhaps.”

“It wasn’t very exciting, ma’am.”

She gestured at the plastic sheets. “Of course it was exciting. You are an officer! In Starfleet! You should be on the front page of this sorry excuse for a newsi. With a picture, in your uniform, and all your handsome men. Not this... excuse for a governor.” She banged the flimsi with a spare fork. It reverted to Russian. “You must forgive me. There is Maria. She needs someone to talk to.”

“Of course, ma’am.” Kirk half rose from his chair as she left the table, then returned to his soup. It was excellent soup. Shortly, there would be excellent sausage and potato hotpot with sauerkraut and a glass of Polish vodka. Kirk concentrated on emptying the bowl before the soup cooled and the fat began to thicken. He’d gained fifteen pounds since being posted to this planet.

His attention returned to the newspaper. He folded it in two, placing it so he couldn’t read it. He knew everything there was to know about the colony, its insoluble problems, its interminable disappointments. He knew that Starfleet was here as a political sop. He knew, too, why he was here.

He called a halt to the dangerous train of thought. Instead, he let his eye roam around the dining room, looking for distractions. Madame Polowski, like every other colonist, had compensated for the grey reality of Isadora III by importing colour. Her table linen was checked scarlet and white, and garishly embroidered. The furniture was painted in red and blue, the floor tiles were green, the very soup in his plate was stained vermilion with paprika and later, his hotpot would be smothered in an emerald canopy of chopped parsley. It wasn’t about flavour, it was about colour, a desperate grasping for colour on a world whose sun conspired with the human eye to exterminate half the spectrum. Sooner or later, he’d been assured, his brain would compensate, and retint the landscapes with vivid colour, but he doubted it, looking around him. Plainly, Madame Polowski, and her customers, after years on the planet, were suffering from unassuageable colour deprivation.

Like most of their needs, it wasn’t satisfied by Starfleet’s presence, in the person of James T Kirk, Lieutenant jg, and there was absolutely nothing he could do to change that.

“Let’s see if you can work out a way to reprogram a planet,” McKaig had sneered, as he’d signed off the order that had sent Kirk here.

This place, Kirk thought, as a plate of steaming, aromatic hotpot arrived in front of him, this place depressed him beyond measure. It was impossible to understand why anyone had expended the energy resources to colonise it.

Kirk’s annoyance with the planet obliterated his appetite. He picked at his dinner but swiftly downed the large measure of vodka Madame Polowski had also placed on his table. It numbed his scalded tongue and made his eyes water slightly.

“You are getting a cold, Lieutenant James,” Madame said solicitously, as she removed the congealing leftovers. The grey-brown head of her wolfhound appeared at the door through to the kitchen, as if he was endowed with second sight. “You must have some fruit to build up your immunity.” She turned away before he could object that he didn’t have time. He had his very own little fucker tied up in his closet, waiting for him.

The external door suddenly swung open with a jangle of bells. Every chair in the room creaked as their occupants turned to look at the newcomer. Only Kirk ignored the interruption. Although he was Iowa born and bred, he had adopted a city dweller’s social habits as soon as he’d moved to San Francisco and the Academy. It would not be anyone interesting, only another of the limited cast of colonists who peopled his nightmare.

“Do you have a table for one?”

The question was ludicrous. Two thirds of the tables were empty. It was also polite, expressed without an Eastern European ‘haf’ or ‘vor’, and unquestionably issued from a female larynx. Kirk now glanced at the owner of the larynx as far as he could without turning his head. A slight, but shapely, black woman had just entered the restaurant. She wore Starfleet uniform, in red, and her sleeves were innocent of stripes. Her hair was cut close to her skull, suggesting to Kirk that she was a freshly graduated ensign, economising on grooming time. Big gold earrings dangled from her ears, however, suggesting that she’d be pushing the uniform code just as soon as she’d gotten on top of her assignments and could sneak a few seconds at reveille for inessentials. Kirk felt his mouth dropping open. This person must be a mirage. There was no such person on Isadora III.

“Of course! Take your choice. Unless you want to join our Lieutenant,” Madame suggested, pointing at Kirk’s half-occupied table.

The newcomer tilted her hips as she wove between the tables, acknowledging each person she passed with a nod and a warm smile. “That would be nice... if you don’t mind?”

“I was just leaving, so...”

“No, you were not,” Madame said firmly, placing a hand on Kirk’s shoulder to enforce this. “This is Lieutenant James.” She leaned in towards the newcomer and said in something that barely passed for a stage whisper, “He is on his own here.”

The young woman’s mouth crinkled as she stood to attention to introduce herself formally to a senior officer. “Ensign Nyota Uhura, in transit. Pleased to meet you, sir.” Next, she held out her hand to her hostess. “And you, Madame... Polowski?”

“Call me Eva. Sit down, ulubieniec. I will fetch your soup.”

The ensign did as she was bid, then raised her eyes to her new dining companion and shrugged her shoulders helplessly. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to intrude.”

“You didn’t seem to have much choice,” Kirk conceded.

“If you want to go...”

He didn’t. He wanted to know exactly how a Starfleet ensign had fetched up in Madame Polowski’s Polish Eating House, on a black winter evening, thirty light years from anywhere.

“I didn’t know there were any other Starfleet personnel here,” she said, echoing his thoughts. She was examining the menu, even though she wasn’t going to be allowed to choose from it. “I thought everyone left on the _Borodino_.”

Kirk felt his jaw descend. “The _Borodino_? Everyone? What kind of everyone?”

“I think it was a scheduling mixup,” the ensign said, now giving ninety percent of her attention to the dessert menu. “The _Borodino_ was supposed to be going to Starbase 109, and then it was diverted to Sigma Mori, and that meant it was coming right past here, and since the order had gone out, about five minutes previously, to judge by the rumpus, to withdraw the Starfleet contingent here, they decided to pick them....” She looked up, as if his stunned silence had suddenly registered. “You didn’t know. You... Oh, you must be Lieutenant Kirk.”

“You mean the _Borodino_ is here now?”

“Oh, no. No. It left about... oh, fifteen minutes ago.”

“Without the Starfleet people.”

“No, well, I got the impression they all left. Except they couldn’t contact you.”

Kirk snatched his communicator off his belt and stared at it. It was working. He ran a diagnostic. It was working perfectly. He checked the settings. It was registering ‘zero incoming’.

“Fuck!” he said with vicious intensity. And then, “Excuse me.” He was still transfixed by the set up screen. It was almost impossible to set a communicator not to receive incoming calls, for obvious reasons. There was no way he could have done it by accident.

It was, he suddenly realised, his squad’s parting shot. Their final supremely unfunny practical joke at his expense.

“You shouldn’t be able to set it not to receive incoming. What have you done to it?”

He glanced across at his fellow diner, just as Madame delivered a bowl of soup. The ensign had her hand out across the table through the column of steam. He placed the communicator in it. She did things he didn’t know it was possible to do to a communicator, then looked at him sternly. “No, you haven’t altered the settings on this. You did it at the transmission end.”

“I... No, I didn’t!”

“Well...” Scepticism hung in the air like a bad odour. “Someone did. And it’s usually... well, someone who doesn’t want to be disturbed.”

“They did it on the main computer. Bastards.”

She shrugged. Obviously, she was a communications specialist, and knew twenty ways to strand a man on a hostile planet by blocking his messages. She probably knew forty ways to stop anyone doing the same to her. “Ensign Duval told Captain Gresham you made a habit of leaving it in your quarters if you didn’t want to be disturbed.”

“And he just believed them?”

“Well... why wouldn’t he believe them?” She seemed honestly puzzled.

“Because they’re scum, they’re fucking...” He bit his tongue. Madame was back with fruit tart and cream. He relaxed back into his seat.

They ate in silence for a minute or two. He glanced at her. Her expression was blank, masking disapproval. Well, fuck her.

“You don’t like Isadora III?” she asked, as the silence became uncomfortable. “You can’t object to the food. This soup is amazing.”

“Not every night for six months.” And for whatever number of nights he was now condemned to languish here before someone arranged transit for him... although... “How long are you expecting to be here?” he asked.

“They told me a couple of weeks. They said there are regular fleet approved transports going from here to Starbase 109, and that’s where I catch up to the _Enterprise_.”

“You have a posting to the _Enterprise_?” He let his spoon drop and looked at her in astonishment.

“Why not?”

He shook his head in disbelief. “Is your father an Admiral?”

“My Comms supervisor was straight off the _Enterprise_. She thought the experience would be good for me.”

“Maybe. But won’t your lack of experience be a disaster for the _Enterprise_?”

“Not if I can help it.”

He thought this through. The vodka and Ensign Uhura’s DD cleavage were getting in the way of what would normally be a simple process. “You’re good then.”

“I know how to stop people turning my communicator off.”

“Yeah, right. I’m command stream. We’re not supposed to know all that technical stuff. It demotivates the junior ranks.”

“I’m quite difficult to demotivate,” she said, with a smirk and another spoonful of crimson soup.

He sat up a little straighter and squared his shoulders. “Did you say two weeks?” If Starfleet would pay commercial for an ensign, they could do the same for a lieutenant who needed to be somewhere else, who had another posting waiting for him. If he did... A chilling uncertainty seized him.

The ensign continued obliviously: “Yes. I thought I'd brush up my Russian and Polish. Maybe find some Ukrainian dialect. You know the poet Vashki Kremov lived here until a couple of years ago? 'Your eyes, your eyes, deeper than mines…' It’s better in the original, of course.”

“It would have to be,” Kirk agreed.

Madame, beaming, exchanged the ensign’s empty soup bowl for a laden dish of paprika huhne. “More torte, Lieutenant James?”

He turned and forced a smile. “I couldn’t.”

“Coffee, perhaps?”

“No, thank you, ma’am.”

“A glass of schnapps then?”

“I have some work to do tonight.”

“Work? Tonight? But Lieutenant James, surely it can wait until the morning?” Madame glanced from him to the ensign with matchmaking eyes. “You must stay and keep this young lady company. This is a frontier planet. There are undesirable elements. A gentleman should...”

The young lady laughed. “I can deal with any undesirable elements for myself, if the lieutenant has better things to do.”

“I surely do.”

Madame made a tragic face and snatched his empty glass. “Of course, you know best. I will bring your bill.”

Uhura polished off a tender mouthful of chicken breast and cream sauce. “I hope this isn’t the only good place to eat around here. I think Eva has matchmaking ambitions.”

“She’s tried to pair me off with every single woman on the planet who’s younger than my mother.”

“I see.” She dipped a chunk of boiled potato into the sauce and paused, the morsel halfway to her mouth. “So. Lieutenant James Kirk. That’s not a joke, is it?”

“A joke? No. Why would that be a joke?”

“Well, you know, James Kirk. James T Kirk. That must be...”

“What?”

“I suppose it’s not that unusual a name.”

“No.” He scowled at her, wondering what point she was trying to make. “What about it?”

“It must get a bit tedious.”

“Being me?”

“People...”

He looked at his empty glass and wondered if Madame had started double-distilling her vodka. “I can tell you, Ensign Uhura, no one has ever made anything of my name until tonight. I must be really stupid, because I’m not getting it. Please let me in on the joke.”

She sat and looked at him for a good thirty seconds, then scooped up some more of her dinner and chewed it thoroughly. “Right. My mistake. Pleased to meet you, Lieutenant James T Kirk. The word is that you’re a... rising star. I know people who have put a month’s pay on you making captain before your thirtieth birthday.”

Kirk felt the blood warming his face. He had placed such a bet himself, five years earlier.

“Although, I have to say, I know people who are putting the same kind of money on a Board of Enquiry and a dishonourable discharge. Which used to puzzle me.”

“Who’s saying that?”

He waited, but she was concentrating on the boiled carrots, parsley, grilled tomatoes and sugar-snap peas that Madame had ranged around the plate to conceal the essential beige-ness of braised chicken in sour cream.

“Have you been researching me?”

He waited for an answer. She continued to find her dinner more interesting than him. Eventually, he said, “It’s been nice meeting you, whoever you are. I hope you’ll excuse me, but I have to go.”

She finished her mouthful before saying, “And save the planet?”

“I thought I'd leave that to you. You could start by putting it back in touch with the twenty third century.”

“Well, I'll be here if you need me.”

He was standing now. He scowled down at her greenhorn presumption. “Look, eat here, stay out of the bars, keep off the base, don’t accept flitter rides from strangers and get someone Madame knows to walk you back to your quarters in the evening. That way, you won’t have to kill anyone. And I won’t have to pick up the pieces.”

She laughed as she cleared her plate. “I’m not fresh out of school. I only kill people who don’t give me any other option.”

He winced at her ridiculous self assurance. “You’re twenty-two if you’re a day. Straight out of some shit-hot academic linguistics programme and you think you know it all because you've had six weeks officer-specialist training...”

“Excuse me, Lieutenant. Didn’t your mother tell you never to tell a lady how old she is?” She paused to give him an opportunity to dig himself in deeper, but he didn’t take the bait. “I’m twenty.”

He kept a good poker face. “Does your big sister know you've stolen her uniform?”

“And I’m not a linguist. I’m a command stream ensign with a communications major. I've done my three years at the Academy.”

He didn’t argue with her. He couldn’t really deny it was possible, since he’d signed on for Starfleet’s command officer programme a clear year and a half shy of his own eighteenth birthday. “That’s good to know,” he said shortly. Then a thought occurred to him. He knew no one on this planet felt they owed Starfleet a favour, and his attempts to convince them otherwise had only irritated them, but Ensign Uhura offered new resources. He smiled easily and moved on. “Okay, I’m sorry. Look, I want you to forget the peasant poetry tour. You’re in luck. There’s something more important you can do.”

She was concentrating on chasing a final shred of parsley. “Really?”

“Make an appointment to see the Governor tomorrow. Speak Russian to him. See if you can’t blag us a transport out of here. I've been here for eleven months, and I've only seen four commercials of any kind come in. I don’t think any of them were fleet approved.”

“But there’s definitely a fleet carrier transport scheduled in six weeks. I’m booked on it. Why are you in such a hurry?”

“I don’t plan to spend even another two days in purgatory if there’s an alternative, that’s what.”

“I haven’t met the Governor, but I think you'll find the port master quite helpful. Long distance carrier schedules are very much his field. And young men in uniform, I hear. Why don’t you blag yourself some transport?”

“What?”

“Why are you assuming I can do that, or that I will do that?”

“Because... you can. You'll make a better job of it than I will. We can both get out of here if we make the best use of our resources. Instead of just sitting around. I’m just suggesting you use what you've got.”

She had been holding her fork in mid air. Now she laid it neatly on her empty plate. “Well, thanks for the advice. I'll think about it. Coming, as it does, from one of Starfleet’s champion users.”

That was all it took, for McKaig’s sneering accusation to ring freshly in his ears, and for Kirk to find himself beginning to defend himself — to himself — all over again.

“You’re using again, Kirk. You’re not a leader, you’re a user.”

Sure, he was a user, if only he had something he could use. You took the resources available - ships, people, agreements, goodwill, obligations, loyalty, trust, whatever, and you used them to get the job done, to solve the problem. The bigger problem. That was what Commander McKaig hadn’t appreciated, and now this Ensign Uhura was too stupid to see it either. No one on the _Enterprise_ was going to be impressed if she was too busy reciting poetry to make her scheduled pickup. She was getting a prize posting, and she’d be expected to pull out the stops to arrive on time. She’d be expected to do whatever it took. You had to focus. There was no gain in being the most popular cadet at the academy: everyone would do their best whether they worshipped the ground you walked on or kept spare tacks in a wax model of you in their desk drawer. They were Starfleet cadets. They couldn’t stop themselves doing their best and what the hell if you'd blown all their rations to buy the silence of a bunch of guard dogs, bartered your team’s first aid supplies for a couple more ‘phasers’, route marched twenty five teenagers through a blizzard and ‘lost’ thirteen of them on the way? The survivors still made it before the deadline, and hit every target, and he didn’t need the loyalty of Academy cadets, because most of them would end up being second rate officers on second rate ships, and anyone who was in the same year as Kirk at the academy and ended up reporting in to him was a loser by definition...

McKaig had let Kirk talk himself to a standstill, and then he’d signed off the order that would put him through that particular course again, and four years later, he’d looked up at Kirk from a new desk and simply said: ‘still using, Lieutenant.’

And here he was.

On this planet, there was nothing to use, nothing anyone could use, and the arrival of Miss ‘I’m only twenty’ Uhura hadn’t changed that.

“You said it, Mister, we’re all users. It’s the way the universe works.” Kirk turned away, striding between the crowded tables. Diners sucked in their stomachs to help him avoid snagging their tablecloths and depositing their goulash on the floor.

The owner stuck out her head and waved a handwritten check at him as he passed the kitchen door, but he was too annoyed to notice.

“Shall I set up an account for you, Lieutenant?” she cried.

He stopped, robbed of his grand exit, not quite enough of a user to walk out on his tab. “I'll pay for it now.”

She handed him the slip of paper and he glanced at it. “Two... I didn’t...”

“A gentleman does not allow a lady to pay for her own meal, Lieutenant James. Even if he has argued with her.”

For a moment, he was too astonished to protest.

“I should say...” Madame was whispering again, fit to be heard over in the barracks. “...particularly if he has argued with her.”

Kirk summoned up a stagey smile. “Of course.” He pulled out his credit chip. The transaction took several seconds to register on Madame’s ancient commset. But he was on an up again. He didn’t care. He was on his way to take out all his frustration and then some. He had his very own little fucker waiting for him at home.

“Good night, Lieutenant James.”

The woman in the headscarf suddenly seemed to rouse from her misery and notice him. She raised a hand to catch his attention, but the door was swinging closed and he was gone.

***

Kirk’s pace quickened as he approached the blockhouse and began to mentally rehearse his arrival. A stab of panic curdled the half-digested goulash in his stomach. What if the kid had freed himself and inflicted further damage, or, rather more likely, escaped?

He jogged the last few metres along the path, then fumbled inputting his code, slamming the door back against the wall when he finally opened it. The chair was tipped drunkenly against the bed, but the closet door was still held by a single hinge and its latch. Kirk kicked the chair out of his way and jerked the door sideways, freeing the latch and twisting the remaining hinge away from the frame.

The kid fell out of the closet. He was still hogtied. Kirk let a sigh escape, and immediately felt stupid. So what if the little fucker had gotten out of the closet? Despite the damage he’d inflicted on the flimsy structure, tied as he was there was no way he could reach the catch on the outer door, and no way he could batter his way through that.

Kirk took a moment to let his breathing slow, then leaned over his prisoner. “Where the hell did you think you were going?” he sneered.

The kid seemed to be playing dead, but after a moment, he rolled over and began struggling to get himself out of the gap between the bed and the closets, hampered by four chair legs and a dislocated door. Kirk let him try, but after a couple of minutes, the show stopped. The prisoner gave up. Only then did he look at his captor. There was blood all over his face and the front of his shirt from a small cut on his forehead. Kirk’s belt was almost severed, and the flex, although the boy was holding his wrists close together, was in two distinct pieces. His wrists and forearms were nicked and grazed.

Clearly, there was something with a sharp edge in the closet. Kirk did not acknowledge this. He did, however, pull open a drawer and take out some support strapping that he’d forgotten earlier. If he had to tie the kid up again, he’d do it more securely. “Christ, you’re a mess. At this rate, you’re never going to get this place cleaned up.” He clicked the multi-tool off his belt and flicked the knife open, then leaned forward to sever the slender link between the boy’s ankles. Misunderstanding, the prisoner tensed. Kirk laughed at him. “Don’t worry. Or maybe do worry. Now your blood’s on the carpet, I can’t incriminate myself any more by killing you, can I?” He paused, to see if this would elicit some kind of protest, some objection, some attempt at a counter argument. No, but there was a wary alertness in the dark brown eyes.

Kirk slapped the knife back onto his belt beside the phaser and pulled his tunic down to make them both inaccessible, the boy’s eyes watching him all the while. Then he threw himself on the bed. “Okay, you said you'd clean up. Clean up.” He pulled a pillow between himself and the wall, so that he could lean back and watch in comfort. The pillow was damp. And he was sitting on something. He pulled the missing hairbrush out from under himself and flung it at his prisoner. “You can start by putting that back in the bathroom.”

“If...” The boy stopped and cleared his throat. His voice was hoarse. For a second, Kirk could imagine the light, new-broken tenor battering the silence outside while he was gone, pleading for help. He narrowed his eyes. As sure as he was that no one had reason to come here, he should still have gagged his prisoner. Next time he left him, he would.

“If I clean up, you will let me go?”

“No.”

“If I pay for the things that they damaged...”

“No.”

The boy was sitting on the floor now. He rested his elbows on his knees, and his face on his wrists for a moment, then he straightened again.

“Then why I will clean up?”

Kirk leaned forward. “Because, if you don’t, I'll kill you. If you do, you can keep hoping that someone will come by, or that I'll have a change of heart. It’s simple really. As long as you do what I say, you can keep on hoping you'll get out of here. But if you don’t, you know you’re dead.”

The kid gave this serious consideration, but didn’t say anything.

“You understand?” Kirk prompted.

“I understand.”

“Then get to work.”

After a moment of hopeless contemplation of his situation, the boy climbed to his feet. He took a step and one knee crumpled under him. He fell against the bed, putting out his hands to save himself from landing on top of the recumbent lieutenant. He gave a nervous laugh. “My leg has... what do you say, it’s dead.”

“Tell it the rest of you will be catching up with it shortly.”

The boy stared at him, uncomprehending. “I’m cleaning up. You don’t need to be unpleasant.”

“You don’t have to be unpleasant either. Only you can’t help it. Tough.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean...” Kirk looked at him, then got off the bed and came to make a closer inspection. “Well, look at you. How old are you?”

“Fourteen.”

“You don’t look it.”

“I think I know how old I am.”

“'I t'ink I know how olt I am.' Don’t they teach you Standard in school here?”

“Of course.”

“You should tell them they’re not doing it right. 'I think', ‘think'. Say ‘think'.”

“Tink.”

“God, you’re stupid _and_ ugly. Look at you.” Kirk put a hand on each of the boy’s knife-blade-thin shoulders and turned him round to look in the remains of the looking-glass. His victim stared stolidly at the crazed surface. “What kind of haircut is that supposed to be? Did your mother put a basin on your head and cut round the edge?”

The kid scowled.

“You know what? I'll cut it for you.”

“No.”

“What did you say?” Kirk halted half way to the bathroom and the nail scissors he’d overlooked until now. Stupid. Stupid.

“I said no.”

“No?” Two strides took Kirk to the drawer in the bathroom, and two more brought him back.

“I will get it cut tomorrow.”

“No, you won’t. You forgot, dumbass. I’m going to kill you, so you can’t get it cut tomorrow. You have to get it cut now.” He stood there, waiting for a response to this unassailable argument. He was almost sorry when he didn’t get one. “You are so fucking stupid.”

“I am not stupid!”

“'I am not stupid, Lieutenant Kirk, sir!'“

He waited once again for the conditioned cadet echo, but the kid clearly wasn’t on the same wavelength. Kirk raised an eyebrow. “So you are stupid?”

No reply.

“You’re a stupid peasant from a race of fucking stupid peasants. Do you know why you fucking Russians colonised this fucking planet? Because you were too stupid to realise it’s fucking uninhabitable. Do you even go to school? Do you even know what a school is?”

The kid muttered something.

“What did you say?”

“School is for losers.”

“Really.” Kirk made eye contact with the face in the mirror. “And what do you think you’re looking at right now?”

The boy’s chin came up, and the eyes moved to take in Kirk’s reflection above and behind him. “I tink I am looking at a loser.”

He was sprawling on the floor before Kirk even knew he’d thrown him there. Seconds later, he was pinned down with a knee in the small of his back, and the curved, short-bladed scissors were hacking lumps out of his hair and scattering them across the faded candy stripe colours of the carpet. When Kirk stood up and the boy lifted his face away from the floor, his scalp was bleeding in a dozen places.

“You look like you’re fucking moulting,” Kirk said, reminded of the farmyard fowl of his childhood.

Long, pale fingers fastened on locks of hair. Then the boy was on his feet faster than Kirk had reckoned with, screaming. Kirk threw the scissors across the room, to land inaccessibly on top of the closets. Then he grabbed the boy’s arms and held him as he yelled and kicked himself into temporary breathless silence.

“Feel better?” Kirk asked. “Got the frustration out of your system? Ready to get back to the cleaning?”

The boy swallowed and pulled out of his captor’s grasp. “You know something? You are the stupid one. I will tell you why. You humiliate a person, and a person will not forget. You insult a person’s nation, and a person will not forget. You...” He paused. “You cut a person’s hair, and a person will not forget.”

“For a cleaner, you’re quite the orator.”

The kid narrowed his eyes. Like most of Kirk’s verbal digs, that one simply confused its target, but there was a dignity to the boy’s silence that made Kirk uncomfortable, so he ignored it. “"I thought you were going clean the bathroom.”

“I will.” The boy turned away.

Kirk followed him. “So you’re fourteen.”

“Yes.” He was looking around the bathroom. It contained water, in the wrong places, assorted empty plastic containers, and not much else.

“Here.” Kirk bent down and picked one of the soaked towels off the tiled floor. He tore a strip off one end. “Use this.”

There was a shallow puddle across the whole floor, with mud and spilled soap mingling together. The boy began mopping up the flood. It was a tedious job, wringing out the towel each time in the toilet bowl, and bending to let it absorb its meagre fill again. After a minute, the kid knelt on the tiles to make it easier. As he worked, the contents of his back pocket edged up and outward, falling onto the wet floor after a few minutes. The kid continued to work, unaware. Kirk leaned forward and picked up the notebook. He flicked it open. It was, of course, in Russian. The kid’s handwriting was neat, maybe a little girlish, although that might have been the effect of the foreign script. Kirk turned the notebook through ninety degrees, and then the same again, as if that might reveal some hint of meaning. He felt irritated, cheated, that he couldn’t violate his prisoner’s privacy, that the little fucker was protected by a screen of ethnic inferiority. He thumbed the pages, looking for names, doodles... preferably the kind of doodle all fourteen year olds naturally drew, and were intensely embarrassed to be discovered drawing.

He stopped when he reached the first page of the book and stared at it in astonishment. Then he laughed. The kid looked over his shoulder, puzzled for a moment, then furious.

Kirk grabbed his arm as he came up, pushing him back against the wall and holding him there. “Office cadet Chekov, huh?”

“Give me that! It is mine!”

The kid’s handwriting turned out to be feminine even in English, but easy to read as a result:

“I solemnly, sincerely and truly declare and affirm...” He flapped the spiral bound notebook at its owner. “You do this in school?”

“No! Give it to me!”

“You’re a space cadet! Gee! You carry this around with you all the time?”

“Give it to me!” He lashed out with one foot and the other slipped on the wet tiles. Kirk’s arm, gripping his, jerked taut, and his head hit the wall with a crack

Kirk’s heart stopped at the bullet-sharp noise, but the kid barely seemed to notice the impact. He swore and snatched at the book, which tumbled into the toilet bowl.

Kirk grabbed the collar of the boy’s shirt and turned him round to face the WC. “Sorry about that, Office Cadet. You were cleaning, remember?”

The kid hesitated for only a moment, then knelt again and returned to work. Kirk shook his head. The little fucker was a genuine 24 carat space cadet! How fucking pathetic! What a clueless fucking loser!

The bathroom was small, and it wasn’t many minutes before the floor was dry and cleaner than it had been when Kirk first arrived. Now he felt a need to keep up the momentum, to eliminate pauses for reflection. “Okay, now the...” His eye fell on Ruth’s picture. The gob of fluid had run over her mouth and chin and half way down her neck. “Now the picture.”

The boy, still kneeling, leaned forward. He raised his towel to wipe off the glass, but Kirk snatched the rag out of his hand. “Not that way.”

“How?” His prisoner gestured toward the empty paper dispenser by the toilet - its contents were lying in a sodden heap in the shower tray. “With those?”

“You can lick it clean.”

“Lick it... It will make me ill.”

Kirk raised an eyebrow. “Like I care if you catch a social disease from one of your friends. I’m going to kill you, remember? You won’t have time to get past the stage where your dick falls off.”

Again, that stoic incomprehension. The kid tried reasoning with him again. “It is poison.”

“No, it’s not.”

“Yes, it says on the bottle. 'For exterior application only'.”

Kirk blinked. “It’s shampoo?”

They stared at each other for a moment, and Kirk watched as understanding dawned and the boy processed what his persecutor had been thinking a minute earlier. And then there was a second epiphany, as the boy realised that whoever had applied the shampoo to the picture had fully intended its owner to think that.

“That is disgusting,” the boy said. It wasn’t clear whether the criticism was aimed at Kirk himself or the departed iconoclasts. The boy thought some more. His pallor intensified. “And you want me to...”

Kirk wiped the picture himself. The towel oozed innocent detergent bubbles.

“She is wery pretty,” the boy said, like a peace offering.

Kirk flung the picture against the tiled shower cubicle wall. It landed with a sodden, unrewarding thump on the wet tissue beneath. “She is the most beautiful woman in the universe,” he said, through clenched teeth, knowing that he’d always see her, henceforth, with a trail of... graffiti across the cupid’s bow of her lips.

The boy shook his head. “No.”

Kirk twisted his hand into the neck of the flannel shirt, dragged the boy into the shower and turned the water on. It was freezing. It was always freezing for at least five minutes and then it was tepid for two minutes, and then it was freezing again. Someone on this planet should be made to realise just how goddam bad the local plumbing was. He held the kid in the spray until his arm began to ache.

“Pick up the picture. Look at it. Is she the most beautiful woman in the galaxy or isn’t she?”

The inks were running around the edges of the glass. The boy picked it up, gave it serious consideration, and seemed to be struggling to find a tactful response. “She is possibly almost the most beautiful woman in the galaxy, but of course, you will understand that I say this, my mother is the most beautiful.”

“Do you have a sister?”

“No.”

“Then I haven’t fucked her. But maybe I've fucked your mother. Does she hang around the spaceport canteen in the evenings?”

“You are a wery bad man,” the boy said seriously through white lips.

“Me? I’m bad? You’re the teenage hoodlum who skips school to dump dead sheep in Starfleet shuttles.”

The white lips twitched.

“You think it’s funny? Maybe after I've killed you, I'll dump your carcase out on the field for your hooker mother to find.”

The boy still looked blank.

“Your whore mother.”

That, Kirk, decided, the boy had understood. His fists had tightened, and his jaw set.

The door chimed.

Kirk had his hand clamped over his prisoner’s mouth before the boy had a chance to realise this was salvation. He hissed a threat, his lips close to the soft shell of the boy’s ear. “One little noise, one squeak, from you, and I'll kill whoever that is, and then I’ll kill you. Understand?”

The door chimed again. Voices, female voices, were audible outside.

The boy nodded against Kirk’s palm.

‘They'll go in a moment,' Kirk told himself. 'Whoever it is...' he couldn’t imagine who it might be. He’d never invited anyone, female or otherwise, to his quarters. The voices were loud, giggly. The chime seemed louder too. '... they'll go in a moment.'

The four different tones of the key combination sounded.

“Looooooootennnnant!”

A blonde woman, who could have been of any age between thirty and fifty, peered around the door. She blinked lashes overburdened with mascara at the sight that greeted her. “You have company!”

She stumbled into the room, followed by a brunette and a redhead. Each held a bottle. They were wearing cheap fake fur overcoats, which they immediately began to remove, revealing black evening dresses, and the straps of cheap underwear, but mostly flesh, beneath.

“Do you have glasses, Lieutenant?”

“Where shall we put our coats, Lieutenant James?”

“I hope we are not disturbing you!”

He was standing in a wrecked bedroom, embracing a sodden fourteen year old boy, and these women were too drunk, or high, to find this strange.

“Lieutenant Berwick asked us to visit you!”

“Lieutenant... He’s not a Lieutenant!”

“He said I am his leaving present to you, but you have company already.” The blonde finally focussed on the boy in Kirk’s arms. “Listen, darlink,” she said, pointing an accusing finger, her voice suddenly a half octave lower, and more fishwife than seductress. “I don’t know who the fucking you are, but he is our fucking mark, so go, now.”

The kid opened his mouth, lips dry against dry skin.

“Who the hell is she?” The redhead strode up to Kirk and his prisoner. She was tall enough to make Kirk feel like a kid himself. She prodded at the boy’s washboard chest with a scarlet nail. “I don’t know you.”

“What the fuck. We will deal with her later. Jaaames. Do you have glasses?” The blonde gazed blankly around the room. “And ice?”

The redhead peeled Kirk’s hand away from the kid’s mouth and stared at his face. “Little cow slut.” She slapped him. “Little uppity cow slut.” She pulled back her hand for another blow. Without thinking Kirk caught and held it.

The kid jerked free and ran. The door sent a shock of cold air through the room as it opened then slammed behind him.

“Ropes,” Blonde said, leaning over to retrieve the mess of cords and ties from the floor beside the bed. “James, you know Lieutenant Berwick didn’t tell us. This is going to be an extra. Big extra!” She pulled the pencil skirt of her dress back down her white thighs, smiling knowingly as she misinterpreted Kirk’s horrified expression.

“The Lieutenant cannot believe his luck. The skinny little bitch has turned, like magic, like miracle, into Three! Beautiful! Woman!”

Brunette adjusted the engineering of her cleavage. Kirk fought the urge to run after the little fucker. He forced himself to focus on Brunette’s face. “Ladies, I’m afraid there’s been a mistake.”

“No mistake,” Redhead said, vacuously confident.

“No mistake, pretty boy,” Brunette echoed. She laced her arms around Kirk in an alcohol infused embrace that somehow toppled them both onto the bed. Kirk started to struggle, but he hadn’t allowed for 300 pounds of flesh piling on top of him. Soft flesh that you couldn’t turn against your opponent because it didn’t offer any damn resistance at all.

It was like wrassling an evil marshmallow.

“Here are ropes... No! Lieutenant, the skinny little bitch... she didn’t use you all up already? There is still something for the lovely ladies, yes? Please tell me yes!” Giggling, Blonde leaned over him. One of her breasts toppled out of her decolletage and into his face as she reached across to the far bedpost. He turned to find a breathing space. The breast shook. She was laughing. Two small cold hands seized his ankles and pulled them away down the bed, stopping him getting any purchase at all to resist as his wrists were tied and his arms pulled straight. He wriggled. He struggled. He cursed. He achieved absolutely nothing.

Someone settled back with their whole weight on his lower legs. For a moment, Kirk was convinced that his bones would crack, but the mattress, god bless its previously loathsome solidity, maintained a precarious counterbalancing thrust.

“Ya znayu yevor! Malchik Marii!”

“Nyet! Malchik Marii. Da!”

A fat white finger wagged in his face. “So, we have found Maria’s son! Naughty, naughty Lieutenant James!”

He strained to lift his head from the mattress and look his assailants in the face. “Please, ladies. Beautiful ladies. I have a girlfriend. I have a fiancee. I’m engaged.”

Brunette patted his cheek comfortingly. “At home, on Earth? We don’t tell her! We promise! No one is telling her.”

Redhead climbed on to the bed to join her companions. She draped a sticklike arm around each pair of plump, naked shoulders: “No one will tell her how you like to fuck boys.”

They turned to each other and laughed. They were sitting on him, all three of them, a tripartite mass of giggling flesh. The three Ungraces.

“Do you think we will tell Maria? That her precious little Pavel is fucking Starfleet for money?”

“She is a nice lady. Why make her cry more?”

“Maybe the socials will help her.”

“If they find her precious little Pavel before she does, they will fuck him too.”

They laughed. The bed rocked. Kirk’s spine threatened to snap in two.

Two cold hands pushed between his pants and tunic, lifted the tunic, opened the belt clasp, a design peculiar to Starfleet, with practiced ease. Berwick, Archer, Hoffman, all had worn such clasps. All had been excused from duty to visit the local clinic to be treated for a variety of sexually transmitted diseases.

“Ladies, please...”

The hands lifted. Blonde: “You not interested? Shall I go to ask Pavel to come back?”

“I don’t fuck boys!”

“We will see. We will see what the little soldier says. Oh, little soldier!” Warm, wet, breath settled sloppily around his cock. “Do you want to play, little soldier... or did you play already today?”

“Stand up if you like to play with the ladies, little soldier!”

“Keep sleeping if you like more to play with the boys!”

“Stand to attention for the lady-generals!”

“I think he is a tired, tired little soldier.”

“I think he has used all his ammunition!”

They laughed. They shook and wobbled. One of the wooden slats under the mattress snapped with a sound like a rifle shot, and they laughed more. They laughed until one of them wet herself.

“Get the fuck out of here, you bloody... you bovine, cow-brained... monsters!”

***

Ensign Uhura wiped her plate clean with a crust of good Polish czosnkowy bread and looked across the restaurant at the list of desserts chalked on a blackboard. The elaborate lettering was blurred in a way which hinted that the choice hadn’t varied in several years. Never mind, the Ensign thought. With dessert, novelty is always a disappointment.

“Madame... Eva... may I try your cherry and chocolate bombe?”

“I think I have just one piece left. Just as well you asked now!” Madame whisked away her empty plate and returned a moment later with a helping of icecream almost black with chocolate, studded with cherries like dilithium crystals, bathed in rich, thick, ripe cream that had frozen to a glaze. She dropped into the chair Kirk had vacated and beamed at her customer. “You don’t mind? Bless you. This floor is so hard at the end of a long day.” She glanced around her domain with quick darting eye movements and lowered her voice. “That poor boy, Lieutenant James. Do you like him?”

“I’ve hardly met him.”

“He’s so handsome. More than when he arrived. He has been eating properly since he arrived here. Our food is very, very good.”

“It is,” Uhura happily agreed, trying to spoon up the icecream at a decorous pace, and wondering how much of Kirk’s bulk was not muscle but the result of Eva’s cooking.

“Of course, when he arrived, it was still summer, and our sunshine made his hair so blonde. Next summer, if he is still here, he should spend all his time in the sun.”

“I don’t think he’ll still be here next summer,” Uhura confided.

“We will lose him,” Madame said tragically. “He will have his own ship. Captain James! He is such a clever young man. So smart, so polite. We will all miss him so much.” Tears oozed from the pink marshmallow creases at the inner corners of Madame’s eyes. “You must excuse me.”

The chair, under Madame’s weight, scraped loudly on the tiled floor. Two or three customers had finished their meals and were moving towards the door, formally muttering goodnights as they went. None of them acknowledged the woman with the headscarf in her exclusion zone of hysterical desperation.

Uhura finished her icecream, patted her stomach reflectively, and thought about strategy. This planet was... well, James Kirk might have a point. This place did seem more like a frontier town from a classic western than a twenty third century outpost of human endeavour. Although, of course, there would be parallels. The most adventurous, brave and enterprising would be here, but also the most desperate, disadvantaged, and exploited.

An audible sob sounded from the corner table, followed by a torrent of reassuring Russian -- at least Uhura supposed it was reassuring. She could only follow the ‘I mean’s and ‘well’s and ‘for God’s sake’s. At the sound of that desperation, the kind of antisocial behaviour desperate people sometimes commit was suddenly a more pressing inconvenience than it had seemed a few minutes ago, when Kirk had insulted her with his offhand: ‘Get someone Madame knows to walk you back to your quarters’.

She hadn’t even located her quarters yet. She’d left her kit in the Starfleet offices, more curious to look at a new world than a new barracks.

But maybe Kirk had a point; if she threw herself on the tender mercies of one of the more acceptable patrons of this little restaurant, she could win an ally, or an informant, at the same time. She glanced around. Two middle aged men were still drinking tea, and one rather younger guy, cleanshaven, but oh... dirty nails. Still, one of the older men was rising to his feet. Uhura leapt up and hurried over to Madame Polowski, who was holding out a clean napkin to the woman in the headscarf.

“Madame, uh, Eva?” She paused by the owner’s shoulder.

“Maria...” Madame firmly folded the woman’s slender fingers around the napkin and turned to smile at Uhura. “Lieutenant James has paid your bill. Such a gentleman. But I was not joking earlier. You should be careful. You may think you can take care of yourself, but you don’t want to kill some poor drunk just because he has no morals, no honor and no self-control.”

“No, I...”

“In such cases, it is his wife’s privilege to kill him.” Madame chuckled energetically. “Please, you should not walk home alone. It is dark now. Maria will go with you.”

Maria looked up, startled. She had used the napkin to dry her eyes, which were red and swollen. She began pushing strands of hair back under her scarf.

‘Damn,’ Uhura thought.

“A moment,” the woman muttered in good Standard, “I must get my coat.”

“Thank you,” Madame breathed when Maria was out of earshot. “I was afraid she would stay here all night.”

“Oh, that’s... my pleasure,” Uhura said helplessly.

Once outside, Maria buttoned her coat briskly. “I am sorry. What will you think of me?”

“I... thought you were...” Uhura stopped and started again in Russian. “I thought you were very upset about something, or...”

“Going out of my mind?” Maria suggested. She looked up at the sky and then glanced up and down the row of prefabricated buildings, as if expecting an attack from somewhere. “Why are you here? Starfleet have been here for five years, and now is the first time they send us someone who speaks Russian.”

“Well, with universal translation technology so...”

“Expensive?”

“Oh, yes, I suppose. Well, really, I haven’t been posted here. I’m just here because it was a convenient place for one ship to drop me off and another one to pick me up and I thought I’d... enjoy a few days here.”

“You thought...?”

“And I don’t get much chance to practice my Russian,” Uhura said. “Universal translation technology being so...” She’d been intending to find a hotel for the night, rather than risk the Starfleet barracks. She glanced around her at the unlit, shuttered buildings. It looked like she should have done some research on that before dining. Still, there might be an inflatable lifepod in the office, for emergencies. “I don’t even know what Starfleet does here.”

“Speaks English,” Maria said. Then she almost laughed. “You want some advice?”

“Certainly.”

“We’ll speak English then,” Maria said, doing so. “Don’t talk Russian here. You’ll spoil your nice Moscow accent.”

“Thank you,” Uhura said gravely.

Maria laughed properly. “I’m sorry. I wish I could tell you this is a beautiful planet, with wonderful people. Some of the people were wonderful, at first. Since then...” She fell silent, looking up at the sky again, and then both ways up and down the street.

“Is it really dangerous, at night?”

“No. Just unpleasant. Slightly less unpleasant than in the day, when you can see it.” She waved her hand at some graffiti scrawled across a wall. Uhura made out the uneven cyrillic characters and resolved not to read any more graffiti if she could help it.

“Why don’t you leave?” she asked. Then frowned. That was a question one pretty much didn’t ask, because, apart from the highly qualified inhabitants of a few heavily subsidised strategic or experimental colonies, most frontier-dwellers had paid their own passage, financed the setup of the colony itself, and in some cases, bought the planet from previous owners or prospectors. Until the colony was actually declared a failure and evacuated at the Federation’s expense, leaving might simply be unaffordable.

“I have been saving,” Maria said. “And God is smiling on me, because the cost of going home has halved.”

“Well, that’s...” This time, Uhura did stop her foot before it went into her mouth. The cost of interstellar travel frequently rose without warning, but almost never fell. She gentled her voice. “Have you... lost someone?”

Maria’s laugh, this time, was brittle and humorless. “I lost my husband two years ago. And I lost my son the day I took him out of his nice school, and away from his nice teachers and his nice friends, and his nice Moscow accent, and brought him here.”

“Oh.”

“He’s not dead,” Maria said firmly.

“Oh, that’s...”

“I know that.”

“I...”

Maria stopped abruptly in the middle of the street. “I know that he’s not dead because he was recorded by a security camera yesterday. He and his... and some other boys were setting fire to the Kindergarten. We only re-opened last week, after the last fire. The governor had asked Starfleet to monitor it, but they said they could not be involved with civil policing. They are here for ‘monitoring’.” She laughed.

“Because Isadore III has a problem with pirates...”

“Not here. Pirates are not a problem here. They have more sense. And anyway, what good does it do to ‘monitor’ pirates? Or to take pictures of little boys setting fire to a kindergarten? We know what our problems are. We need solutions, not statistics.”

“But you do have...police?” Uhura asked diffidently.

“Certainly we have police. All of the Governor’s no good cousins and half brothers and nephews are police officers on Isidora. And all of his sisters and aunts teach in our schools, the stupid, vicious sisters and aunts.”

“Oh.” It didn’t seem the right time to question this rather sexist arrangement.

“His ex-mistresses are, for your information, the Director of the Hospital, the Secretary for Trade and the Inspector of Public Hygiene.”

“And his current mistress?” Uhura quizzed, wondering if perhaps she had, by accident, found her informant.

Maria snickered. “A manicurist at the Hotel Isidora.”

“Not the Commissioner for Leisure and Tourism?”

“I like you,” Maria said earnestly. “Are you sure you’re really Starfleet?”

They seemed to have stopped walking. “Your office,” Maria explained.

“Thank you.” Uhura looked at the dim glow of the light in the lobby and wondered if she could spend the night under a desk.

“I’m sorry, I should have said where we were going. Starfleet uses the barracks that the construction workers left, out by the terminal. But I assumed, since you’re only here for a few days, you would prefer...” Maria gestured across the road at a small building which was faintly illuminated by the pale pink glow from half a ‘Hotel’ sign. “It’s clean, and quiet and cheap,” Maria reassured her. “Tell Alexa Sergeevna that Maria Leopoldova sent you. But go back to Madame Polowski for breakfast.”

“Thank you, and...”

“Yes?” Maria hesitated, half-turned impatiently to go.

“I’m here for a few days, at least a week. Two of us. And we’re not here officially, just waiting for transfers, so we don’t have much to do. We could find your son for you.” She realised as she said it that she had no authority to speak for Kirk, or maybe even for herself, if he ordered otherwise.

Maria shrugged. “You can look if you want to.”

“You don’t think we’ll find him?”

“You might. But you won’t find him for me. I am leaving tomorrow. There is a ship, with a berth, that I can pay for. I am leaving.”

The woman sounded almost uncaring, but a moment later she burst into tears. “No, I cannot do it. I cannot go without him!” She pulled the scarf off her head and held it to her mouth for moment, then rushed away down the street.

Uhura stared after her for a moment, then turned back to the lobby. Her luggage was still visible inside the half-open inner door of the office. She put the code Duval had given her into the key pad and entered the suite of rooms that was Starfleet’s local headquarters.

She hadn’t been allowed into the main office when she’d arrived earlier that evening. “Cap’n Jim won’t want you in here,” Duval had told her confidentially. She’d been ushered into the little kitchenette, where a couple of chairs were pulled up to small square table. There had always been one of the division hovering in the doorway, ogling her legs more or less blatantly, and incidentally blocking her exit. She hadn’t really thought about it at the time. She’d just assumed they were corralling her until their CO, and hers, returned, and she could report to him. Not that she had any reason to. She was in transit, with an authorised schedule, and quite capable of looking after herself. Courtesy required her to make her presence known, but since the guy would be leaving in the next hour, he’d probably barely register that she hadn’t announced her arrival. Still, the discourtesy bothered her, and there might be arrangements in place for accommodation and catering. If she ignored those, she’d have to pay her own bills, which would be stupid. She rose to her feet every few minutes, fully intending to pull rank and demand to be put in touch with Lieutenant Kirk, or told about quarters and canteen vouchers. But every time, Duval appeared as if by magic and assured her that ‘Cap’n Jim’ was too busy to talk to her right now, but would be with her shortly. She wasn’t intimidated by Duval’s oily flirtatiousness, but she had no grounds to do anything but wait. Thirty minutes later, when they’d abruptly departed the building in a cussing draggle, she’d realised that she would have to find dinner, and accommodation, for herself.

The office was, Uhura thought with a sigh as she dialled up the inner lights, quite a gallery. Every wall, spilling over onto the windows, was plastered in human flesh tones. On closer examination, each sheet was inscribed with a loving message from a family member: ‘With lots of luv from your ever-luvvin little sister, Ethel,’ one read. Family pictures were permitted. Within reason. Reason seemed to have deserted this particular Starfleet office. Some of these females could not conceivably be related to any species permitted by the Federation to enrol.

One desk was an exception. Above this workstation, there was a picture of an attractive middle-aged blonde woman with a hand on the neck of each of a pair of huge working horses, a family group consisting of a young man and woman proudly embracing an obviously very new baby, and a traditional, chaste sweetheart picture, so innocent it could be a kid sister, but more likely a girlfriend. She was pretty, in a way that Uhura found oddly annoying. The picture was signed, “To James - luv you lots! - from your Ruth.”

“Cap’n Jim,” she repeated aloud, as she moved to examining the desktops themselves. There was a great deal of printout, but little evidence of work. Flimsies were scrawled with games of tic-tac-toe. A huge target had been drawn on a patchwork of paper taped to the door, and several improvised darts, naturally pointy components from Starfleet equipment with awkward protuberances filed off, and surprisingly well made paper flights, were still impaled.

There were four computer screens, all sleeping. Uhura waved her hand along the row of sensors, bringing them to life. One stuck at ‘video error #35688’, two brought more pornography into focus, and one revealed a hastily composed message:

‘Home in nine days. Get your nickers off. Eric’

The idiot had been in too much of a hurry to hit send. Uhura kindly did it for him, and logged off. She wrinkled her nose at the dust and grease on the screen and turned back to what she assumed was Cap’n Jim’s workstation. His screen was slightly cleaner, and showed only the standard ‘Fleet interface. Uhura walked out to the kitchenette and came back with a disposable towel, grateful that centuries had passed since she would have had to share a keyboard with these potential plague carriers.

Once the screen was clean, she found herself tidying the desk too. There were a couple of printouts from the office of the governor, and an oddity, a handwritten letter. It was lying open, and Uhura, who could take in a whole page of print at a glance, read the even, rounded script before she could choose not to.

‘Dearest James

‘You must be real surprised to get a letter. I thought about this real hard, and I decided it would be much easier on you if I wrote you, rather than booking a voice call, or even waiting until you came home.

‘I know you’re being brave and everything, out there defending us from aliens and finding new worlds and lifeforms and weird stuff, and treasure, but it’s real hard for me too. I’m just sitting at home and all my friends, and even my sister, are out having a good time. Of course I’m faithful to you, you know that, but now I have to tell you about Dalyzell.

‘Dalyzell’s father is a friend of Daddy’s. They’re in the same line of work, so Dalyzell really understands what it’s like to be in that line of work, and he’s going to be one too. Daddy really, really likes Dalyzell. We were just talking, Dalyzell and me, when they had a family day at Daddy’s office. You remember, like last fall? And we just got on so well. I felt I’d really found a friend who understood me. We went to a few things, not together but at the same time, if you know what I mean. I’m sure you wouldn’t like me to sit at home and be lonely and miserable.

‘You say ‘Dalyzell’ like ‘Dashell’, if you didn’t know that. It’s not really an Iowa sort of name.

‘He’s five foot eleven, and weighs one hundred ninety pounds, and he’s a linebacker and he has hair the colour yours used to be when you were little in that picture your mother has. He took me to a game last week so I’d understand what a linebacker does. Just that. He likes me to be able to talk to his friends about the things they like to talk about. They don’t like it when I talk about boring Starfleet stuff, although Dalyzell says he’s going to work in his Daddy’s firm’s Vulcan City office next year.

‘Anyway, I thought I should tell you that Dalyzell has asked me to marry him. Daddy says I should say yes, but I’ve still thought about it really, really hard. I’ve hardly slept the last two nights, since Dalyzell asked me.

‘And anyway, I’ve decided to say yes. You’re the first person I’ve told!

He took me out to choose my engagement ring the same day he asked me. His Daddy lent him the money to pay for it.

‘I know you’ll be really, really unhappy, and I’m very sorry, but it’s a long long time since I’ve seen you and I hardly remember what you look like except in your pictures.

‘Mom says Hi.

‘Love and

‘Oh, silly me! I can’t say that anymore!

‘With kind wishes

‘Ruth Gibb

‘PS – your Mom told me your cat died. I’m real sorry, even though he scratched me.’

“Gone for nine days, got my knickers off, Ruth,” Uhura paraphrased. Then she thought about it. “No, it can’t be real. It has to be a wind up.” She glanced at the handwriting on some of the pictures on the wall, and at the spelling, then looked back at Ruth’s portrait, and at the immaculately spelled Dear James letter. “It’s real.”

She was wondering why Kirk would have left it there for his squad to read, until an unpleasant thought struck her. She flipped the letter over and looked at the envelope beneath it. It bore the frank-mark of paper mail delivered by the _Borodino_.

“But she would have called him while this was on its way,” she rationalized. “Must have...”

Then as her eye fell on the ingenuous phrases again, she realised it was far, far more likely that Ruth Gibb had forgotten James Kirk forever as soon as the flap was stuck down on the envelope.

The envelope had torn. There was no way she could pretend that the letter hadn’t been read. She did her best to put the letter back inside without making it look even more read than it was.

Her final task was to orient herself to the local setup and routine, if there was one. Uhura quickly logged in to the system, holding her breath until it was confirmed that no bored squaddie with technical ambitions had changed the protocols on the local net and locked out her standard Starfleet privileges. In moments, she’d found Lieutenant Kirk’s allocated quarters, along with his schedule and the squad’s bulletin board. Kirk’s men had thoughtfully plastered farewell messages over it. She stopped reading them after the first.

“Those horses don’t look the type,” she said firmly, shouldering her pack and dialing the lights back down.

Outside, winter rain had started falling through the darkness. Uhura paused in the office doorway to consider her options. Kirk might, of course, have gone anywhere on the planet, but he was off duty, pissed off, disillusioned with the local facilities, and possessed of a girlfriend to whom he was probably being laudably, not to mention laughably, loyal. He was probably in his quarters, messaging Ruth, and wondering why he hadn’t heard from her for the last two weeks. If she was wrong about that, Uhura probably had very little chance of finding him at all, until he turned up at 0800 tomorrow morning to command his depopulated squad headquarters. Uhura bit her lip as an unexpected wave of sympathy caught at the back of her throat. Poor guy. Abandoned. And utterly, fundamentally, incapable of seeing the funny side of it.

And here she was, taking him a Dear John letter. She patted her pocket. Maybe it could wait. Maybe, given that they would be seeing quite a lot of each other over the next two weeks, it would be kinder to put it back on the desk and let him believe she hadn’t read it. James Kirk had already received one kick in the balls today. However much of a self-aggrandising prig he was, he could do with a break. But on the other hand, delaying someone’s mail was considered pretty low, the kind of thing a good communications officer wouldn’t do. Uhura stood in the middle of the puddled road, considering.

She glanced at the hotel Maria had recommended. Its prefabricated walls looked grey and cold in the streetlights’ glow, but neat, not marked with graffiti. A little illumination escaped around its blinds, hinting at warmth within. Perversely, its promise of small comforts only made her more aware of Kirk’s isolation in the spaceport barrack-block. Uhura sucked in a resolute breath. Maria. That was an idea. And if Cap’n Jim did defy the the laws of nature and make Captain, he’d owe her a favour.

***

Lying tied, spreadeagled, on a damp bed with the good hairbrush your mother gave you in a place where no hairbrush should ever be, and finding that you weren’t even sure if you wanted to experience the embarrassment of being rescued, might make a man philosophical. It only made Jim Kirk mad. The sheet under his face hadn’t been changed all that recently, and was now damp with saliva. In a few more hours, he reflected, he could quite possibly drown in a clammy soup of his own sweat, saliva, shed skin cells and local bacteria.

The Ungraces had thoughtfully turned out the lights as they left, but they had not quite shut the door. That gave Kirk some hope that a passerby might notice and investigate. He couldn’t actually remember ever seeing anyone at this end of the barrack block, but someone must come by to do maintenance stuff. Eventually.

If by then, only a skeleton remained, maybe it wouldn’t be obvious what had happened. Or who he was.

He had more chance of being heard because the door was open, but he was saving his voice until he could hear someone outside. He hadn’t lied to the little fucker: an unamplified voice, particularly one that had to be projected into a damp pillow, wouldn’t carry beyond two or three blocks, and there were twelve between Kirk and the little used perimeter road around the spacefield.

And it was getting cold, with the door being open.

Kirk was biting down, hard, on a sudden, unaccustomed urge to cry when the door hinges creaked. He froze and held his breath.

He could almost feel the air stir as the door slowly opened. Don’t turn on the lights, don’t turn on the lights, he mouthed, then wasn’t sure if he’d said them aloud, then realised he should say them aloud. “Don’t turn on the lights. They’ve been rigged to detonate a high grade di-deuterium explosive.”

It had the advantage of being the kind of instruction that stopped innocent civilians in their tracks. If this was Miss ‘I’m only twelve’ Uhura, a longshot, it would also tell her that a colleague was in serious danger and she should not take any independent action, pending further orders. Well, it would if she’d paid attention in security training.

Whoever it was seemed to have frozen, one way or another. One of them had to say, or do, something.

“Di-deuterium does not exist.”

Kirk pushed his face into the pillow to stifle a giggle. The little fucker had come back. Damn him. Why the fuck would he do that? “It does, and it’s top secret.”

“It is theoretically impossible. It cannot exist. Like... a triangle with four sides.”

There must be some way he could make use of the kid’s return without letting on just how vulnerable he was. He just couldn’t quite work out the twist, the smart move. While he racked his brains, the kid continued pedantically:

“There is not a transperiodic version of every element. Di-lithium is formed by two anti-neutrons and two neutrons in stable configuration within lithium atom. The deuterium nucleus, which has just one proton, does not allow this stable configuration.”

Kirk could imagine the kid reciting that from a teaching page. “Look, well, we both know that, you and me, but most people don’t. I just named the most frightening thing I could think of so you wouldn’t blow yourself up. I don’t have a clue what they’ve used, I only know that if you switch the lights on, we’re both dead.”

There was a stubborn and unhelpful silence. Then Kirk realised he knew, somehow, that the kid was moving into the room.

“I’m real sorry about what happened earlier,” he continued in a businesslike but conciliatory tone. “We were being watched. I had to... I had to maintain my cover.”

The bathroom door also had talkative hinges. Kirk scowled, puzzled, into the pillow. The kid had come back to use the bathroom? Then he realised, and smiled into the pillow. “You came back for your notebook, didn’t you? I’ll let you have it if...”

“I know that the ladies have tied you up. I heard them say so. I will take my notebook and go.”

“You can’t just walk away. If no one finds me...”

“I will tell someone.”

“Then they’ll walk in and if I’m not alive to warn them...”

“I do not believe you there are high explosives. But I will tell someone. I will tell them to be wery careful, and not to believe in you.”

“Thank you, I guess.”

“Perhaps.”

“I can make it worth your while to untie me. Is there something you want? Maybe...”

“I don’t want to untie you. You are a wery bad man and I don’t know what you will do after I untie you. I think I will tell the police that you are here.”

“But you don’t want to talk to the police.”

The kid didn’t deny that, but had an answer anyway. “I will call them but I will not tell them my name.”

If only Kirk could have been sure the kid would have made that anonymous call, he thought he could have borne the reaction of the police, who didn’t like Starfleet, who resented like hell the presence of Starfleet, who would probably die laughing and dine out on the story for the rest of their lives if they didn’t.

But he couldn’t be sure. “There must be something I can offer you... if you’ll just untie one hand, just one hand, it will take me a few minutes to get free and you’ll be long gone. I mean, you'll be out of here before I can do anything to you.”

“I don’t trust you.”

“One hand! I’m not fucking Houdini!”

“I do not care who you fuck, if it is not me.”

Kirk banged his head on the pillow. “Don’t worry, Houdini isn’t here, and I have no intention of fucking him. Or you. I really don’t fuck little boys. Come on. What can I promise you?”

“I do not trust you to keep your promise.”

“Take something now.” The words were out before Kirk remembered that the kid’s friends had probably already taken anything that glittered for a fourteen-year-old. “You must want something.”

“Only my notebook. I only want my notebook.” A pause. “Did you...” The kid seemed unable to finish his question.

Kirk identified the problem. “I don’t remember any of the ladies going to the bathroom, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

He was left in suspense for a moment. The kid fell over some cleaning materials on his way to the toilet, and then could be heard fishing out something wet and falling over some more stuff on his way back. Kirk wondered if he didn’t turn the lights on because he believed Kirk a little bit, or because he simply hadn’t thought about it.

And now he’d leave, Kirk thought, but he didn’t hear the door opening. The bed juddered as someone walked into it.

“What are you doing?”

“Nothing.” The kid was standing there, with his precious, probably wrecked notebook, probably plotting revenge.

“I’m really sorry about the notebook. I shouldn’t have laughed at you. It’s not stupid. I used to dream about being in Starfleet too.” He wondered if that sounded sufficiently sincere.

“But you are in Starfleet. Now you are in Starfleet, now.”

“Yes.” Kirk sighed. In his current position, it was hard to play ‘starfleet hero’. “Yes, I am.”

They were both silent, then both spoke at once.

“I planned...

“I want...

“...to be on a starship.”

Kirk snapped, “So why are you skipping school and sabotaging Starfleet shuttles?”

He could almost hear the kid recoil, and cursed himself for his lack of self-control. He had no time for people who talked about ‘understanding’ the enemy, about empathy, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t exploit the enemy’s willingness to empathise with him. “You need to get back to school and work on your grades.”

“It was a joke. For fun. Something to do, better than nothing.” The kid kicked the wall behind him with his heel. “On Isidora, no one has grades for Starfleet.”

“I guess not,” Kirk agreed, aware that many schools, even on Earth, grumbled that they lost bright kids to 'Pre-Fleet' crammers. “So, is that why you dropped out?”

“Dropped out?”

“Stopped going to school.”

“No. All my friends stopped.... dropped....dropped out.”

“Are your friends planning to be on a Starship someday?”

“No.”

“But you are.”

“Yes.”

“Why do you hang out with them?”

“They are my friends.”

“They’re trash.”

“They are not trash.”

“Okay, stick by them. You’re wasting your time, kid. Starfleet doesn’t take trash. Whatever hell your friends are headed for, you’re going right along with them.” It was a satisfying thought, Kirk decided, as he ground his forehead into the pillow to relieve the ache in his neck.

“They are not trash.”

“Did they know you were in here? Did they come back for you when I left you here? Did you ask yourself that?”

The kid didn’t answer. Then Kirk heard a slightly tremulous breath being released. ‘Oh, God,’ he thought. ‘that was a cheap shot and now I’ve pushed him too far. He’ll climb up on top of the closets, find the nail scissors and...’

“I only have them.”

“Well, that’s…” Kirk could taste sour pillow as he stopped with his mouth open, remembering an evening shortly after his arrival on Isidora when he’d realised that the natives could all speak Standard but simply didn’t choose to when he was around. He’d joined his squad in the spaceport canteen and tried to ‘fit in’. Just the once. “That’s tough.”

“Did you have money with you, when you came in?”

“No.”

“You have a bank account.”

“Of course I do. But I don’t have a working computer here, not any more.” Kirk scowled into the pillow and curled his hands into protective fists. It was a standard bank account, protected by standard fingerprint scanning. A detached finger would work just fine, but only if the person with the finger had the account reference and seven character code. And a person capable of detaching a finger might, conceivably, be prepared to try and obtain the reference and code with a little additional physical coercion. Kirk told himself that actually, Pavel seemed a pretty nice kid who’d simply fallen in with some troubled older teens. Not a budding torturer. Definitely not a budding torturer. There was a moment of silence, then Kirk said, with a casual laugh, “Don’t waste your time thinking about it. I’m a Starfleet Officer. I can resist...”

The bed creaked as the boy knelt on it and began patting his way across the mattress.

“What are you doing?” Kirk demanded.

“I want to check your pockets, for money.”

“I told you, I don’t have any!” Kirk insisted, as a fingernail tickled his naked thigh. Then a hand landed square on his ass. There was a sharp intake of breath, but the kid hadn’t quite kept his balance, and had to wriggle his knees up closer before he could lift the hand away. At that moment, the light went on.

***

“Oh my God,” Uhura said.

“Stay right there,” Kirk snapped.

“Oh, I wasn’t going anywhere.” She paused. “And... I don’t think you are either.”

“It’s not what it looks like.”

“It isn’t? Oh. I guess you’re not seeing it from quite where I’m standing. I can’t really imagine what it looks like from... But it’s none of my business. I only came in because the door was open. I thought maybe someone had broken in.”

The bed settled a little as Pavel crawled backwards and removed his negligible weight. The bathroom door creaked open and snapped closed.

“Is that... person... as ... young... as he appears to be?”

“I can’t see him. I don’t know how old he looks.”

“There’s hair all over the floor.”

“Is there? Well, as you may have noticed, I’m not lying here in this wreck of a barrack room because I want to. And I don’t know what you’re ‘thinking, but I didn’t bring that no-hope, no-future vermin... kid... thing...”

“Okay! Okay! Take a deep breath. You’re right. I didn’t think it through. You’re obviously not in control of this situation.”

“Right!!”

“Is he okay in there?”

“Who?”

Her knuckles rapped on the bathroom door, gently. “Hey, guy, are you okay?”

Kirk couldn’t make out the reply, if there was one. “How do I know if he’s okay in there? He broke in to my quarters. He was looking for my bank chip.”

“Oh, I see. And you couldn’t stop him because...”

She was a she-devil, Kirk decided. “I’m tied to this bed with a fucking hairbrush up my ass! Untie me!”

“Is that an order?”

“No!” He took the deep breath. “No, it’s not an order. It’s a request. Please, Ensign Uhura, please. Take pity on a fellow officer. My squad, when they unhooked my comm link and stranded me on this HELLHOLE planet, set the local whores on me as some kind of APOLOGY. THAT FUCKING HURTS!”

“You should never have used the end with the bristles.”

“You should have let me fix that myself.” Kirk’s eyes were screwed tight as he struggled to put some calm self-assurance back into his voice.

“I considered that. I decided you were better not expecting it. Not getting too tense.”

“That fucking hurt,” Kirk repeated, while privately admitting to himself that she was probably right, although if he’d been in charge, he’d have investigated the possibility of providing some lubrication. Sure she’d achieved the main objective, but she hadn’t thought about the collateral damage... “Are you going to untie me now?”

“He just broke in here, really?”

“Exactly like you did. He was sneaking around in the dark, looking for trouble, and he saw an open door. Like you did, right?”

“I was looking for you, not trouble. But I can see an open door would be a temptation on a night like this. His clothes are wet through...”

“Look. I’m tied down. Face fucking down. He could be wearing a fucking tutu for all the fuck I know. Untie me! This time that is a fucking order!”

“You want me to put this hairbrush back?”

“No!”

“If I untie you, are you going to do anything weird?”

“No. I promise you. I’ll just lie here and think about how my arms are going to feel when the nerves start working again. Please, please, please, untie me. You can clear right out of here in the ten hours it’ll take me to get enough feeling back to untie my ankles. You can take him with you. Please take him with you. But untie me first. Please!”

“Just a moment. Hey, kid, are you okay?”

“Of course he’s okay.”

“Can you hear me in there?”

“He’s a low life vermin. The colony’s teenage kids drop out of school and spend their time stealing flitters for kicks. It’s just... it’s just one more thing that’s wrong with this fucking planet. Mantle shakes, an unstable ionosphere, and fourteen-year-old petty crime lords...”

“He’s fourteen?”

“I don’t know! He just broke into my room. In the dark. I don’t know anything about him.”

She knocked again. “Hey, kid, what’s your name?”

“For pity’s sake, untie me, woman!”

“What’s his name?”

Kirk bit his tongue. She’d spoken right by his ear. “I don’t know.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Look, Ensign... Untie me.”

“Hold on a moment. Come out. No one’s going to hurt you.”

“You will not untie him, right?” The kid’s voice was nervous, but determined. “I just want to take what is my book, and go.”

“You’re sure that’s yours?”

“Yes. Mine. I didn’t steal anything. He said he would give me money, but I don’t believe him. He is a wery bad man.”

“Oh, God,” Kirk groaned aloud. “I offered him money to untie me. That’s all. What else was I supposed to do? I didn’t know you’d be visiting.”

“Hm,” Uhura said. “That sort of makes sense. Look, what’s your name? Do you have somewhere to go? It’s going to freeze out there tonight.”

“I will go to my home.”

“Straight there?”

“Yes. Or...”

“What?”

“He offered me money, if I would untie him, but I was afraid to untie him. Now you are here...”

“Now Ensign Uhura is here, I don’t need to pay you to untie me.”

“Oh. Yes, but...”

Kirk twigged the way the kid’s mind was working and hastily changed his response. “Yes, you’re right. You were going to untie me, only you were startled by Ensign Uhura’s arrival, and when you realised that I wasn’t dressed, you were naturally concerned what she might think. Because, of course, there was no reason for her to think anything. At all. Was there?”

Had that been a clear enough invitation to exchange silence for a moderate sum of money? Probably not. The little fucker, the nice, reasonable, little fucker, was after all only fourteen, and not used to negotiating in a foreign language.

“I want two thousand and four hundred and twenty eight credits to pay me to untie you, because I agreed to untie you, and you agreed to pay me, and we have a contract.”

“That is... a strangely precise and very large sum of money,” Kirk said, wondering if the kid was planning a legal career if he didn’t get into the Academy.

“Don’t worry. I’ll untie you, Lieutenant,” Uhura said. “No one should be forced to negotiate with blackmailers in such an undignified position. And blackmail shouldn’t be encouraged,” she added as an admonitory afterthought.

“He’s not blackmailing me!” Kirk protested, but was glad, nonetheless, when the tension in his right arm was released. He began the painful process of rotating his shoulder joint “I didn’t do anything.”

“If I stay on this planet, the police will ask me questions,” the boy said, but Kirk thought that his heart wasn’t really in it.

“He doesn’t have anything to blackmail me with. I’m the one who’s tied up. Come on, Ensign. Apply a little common sense to this situation.”

“I have. That very precise sum of money is exactly enough to purchase two tickets from Isadora to Starbase 109, on the SS _Camorra_ , which happens to be leaving tomorrow.”

Kirk tensed. “You got us tickets?”

“I happen to know that there is a ticket available.”

“Let me up!”

“You do know that Starfleet won’t pay. The _Camorra_ ’s owners are not an approved carrier.”

“I don’t care. Let me up. I’ll pay for myself...”

“No!” The kid’s voice was now loud in Kirk’s left ear. “See, I said you were a wery bad man. You do have money. A great amount of money.”

“Right. I have it. You don’t have it.”

“You lied to me.”

“Of course I lied to you! What do you expect! Now get out of here, scram. Be grateful you got off so lightly.”

“He’s not going anywhere in those wet clothes.”

“I will not take my clothes off,” the kid said firmly.

“Who asked you to take your clothes off?” Uhura demanded.

“You did.”

“You see how it is, Ensign? He twists everything you say. Just let him out of here. He won’t freeze. His friends are waiting just outside to take care of him.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.” Her voice was firm. “Pavel?”

“Hold on!” Kirk interjected. “You know him?”

“You are Pavel Chekov, aren’t you?”

“No.”

“Well, okay, but maybe you know Pavel?”

The boy hesitated. “Maybe.”

“Why would Pavel want to buy two tickets to Starbase 109?”

“Why not? Maybe to go to Starbase 109.”

“Two tickets?”

“Why are you asking?”

“If, just as a hypotheses, I gave you the money to buy one ticket, what would you....would Pavel do?”

“I would... I don’t know.”

“Would you go alone?”

“No! I mean, I don’t know if he vould. I don’t know.”

“Is there some point to this, Ensign? Because now my right arm is getting some feeling back, the pain in my left shoulder...”

“Shut up! What would you do, Pavel? Go alone?”

“No. We need two tickets. That is why I asked for money for two tickets. But if you give me I will take money for one ticket and give it to... to the bank. Until we have enough money for two tickets. And not call the police. Okay?”

“Hm,” Uhura said thoughtfully. “Well... What do you think, Lieutenant?”

“What do I think about what?” Kirk pulled his right arm completely straight by his side. The relief was intense. “I don’t care. Just let him go.”

“Okay.” There was a moment of silence. “Right. Is that the transit office?”

“What are you...”

“This is Ensign Nyota Uhura. I asked you to hold a ticket earlier this evening, on the _Camorra_? I believe you may have had a cancellation this evening. Chekov. Just one, yes. Good. Is that ticket still available? Can I ask you to hold that ticket for an hour… okay, for twenty minutes. And now, I’d like to confirm my earlier booking. The passenger name is Chekov, initial P. Yes, he’s a local resident. No. Payment to be charged to Lieutenant James Kirk. Hold on a moment, yes, you can speak to Lieutenant Kirk. He’ll give you his charge details.”

He could hear the background hum of office activity as a handcomm was held to the side of his head. “Talk,” Uhura said firmly but quietly.

He glared at her but confirmed the purchase, giving them his account details. When they asked him to press his thumb to the security reader on the handcomm, he let Uhura do that. She completed the call, thanking the ticketing clerk politely. “Now, Pavel, tell me your mother’s code.”

“Why? No.”

“Madame Polowski will know it...”

“Okay!” The kid rattled off the numbers in Russian. Uhura didn’t, Kirk noted, need to ask for repetitions or clarification. “Maria? Is that Maria Chekov? This is Nyota Uhura, we spoke earlier. No, no, listen to me. I found your son. He’s safe. And not in any trouble. No, listen. I have another ticket for the _Camorra_. It’s paid for. In Pavel’s name. No, he wants to go. I can bring him to the spaceport, or to your home... yes, of course. You need to get back to them and tell them you want the ticket you cancelled. You need to do that right away. Yes. Does Pavel need to... No? Okay. I understand. In an hour. Yes. Goodbye.”

“Nyota...”

“Ensign Uhura to you, Lieutenant Kirk.”

“Ensign Uhura, please, now you’ve emptied my bank account, and persuaded yourself you’re some kind of avenging angel because you’ve reduced the delinquent count on this planet by one, will you please FUCKING UNTIE ME!”

“Pavel, your mother will pay for the other ticket. You can both leave. Is that what you want?”

There was a moment of silence, then he asked uncertainly, “Two tickets? We go together?”

“Yes. I’ll take you to the spaceport to make sure you get there safely. Go in the bathroom now, wash your face and I’ll look out some dry clothes for you. Lieutenant, do you have some scissors, or a knife, something I can use to cut down a shirt and some pants?”

“On top of the closets.”

“Really?”

“It’s a long story. If you’ll untie me I’ll climb up and get them for you.”

“Hm. Okay.”

She started working on the knot at his left ankle. His struggles to escape had pulled it too tight. “No good, I’ll have to get the scissors and cut this. I hope it wasn’t a particular favourite.”

“Favourite what?”

“Necktie. Kind of fancy. Blue and white diamond pattern.”

“No, don’t!”

Her heart sank. A gift from Ruth. “Okay, I’ll cut the rest and you can worry at this one for yourself.

“Oh, fuck, cut it.”

“Not from Ruth after all?”

“What?”

“Oh, sorry, I was... thinking aloud. I was in your office. I noticed the picture of Ruth. And, um, jumped to conclusions.”

He was silent.

“She’s... very pretty.”

“Yeah, so people say.” He could hear Uhura open one of the closet doors and lever herself up with one foot on a shelf and one hand on the top of the door, to use her free hand to search the top. She found the scissors almost immediately and dropped lightly back to the floor.

“But,” Kirk said, semi-seriously, suddenly cheered by the existence of Starfleet operatives who could do something efficiently, capably, and without swearing, “not quite as beautiful as Maria Chekov. Apparently.” The prospect of freedom was going to his head, like alcohol.

“Are you... close?”

He considered this, considered the trail of translucent pearly shampoo. He felt a little uncomfortable. “Sort of.”

“Ah. Oh, that’s better, Pavel. Did you... what happened to your hair?”

“Nothing.”

“Oh. Okay. Let’s see about some dry clothes. Here are some pants, and a shirt, and here’s a belt. Your shoes are wet too. Can’t do anything about that, but maybe some dry socks...”

“What are we going to do?”

The ensign folded over the cuff of the pants where they needed to be shortened and started cutting. “What are we going to do about what?”

“For two weeks, on Isidora, or six months, or however long it takes, while we wait for a Fleet approved transport?”

“Fix things?”

***

“Which,” Uhura said to the _Enterprise_ ’s helmsman, as she topped up her wineglass and poured a last dribble into his, “is why our new navigator can get away with non-regulation hair, and making ridiculous comments about Russian inventions. And he can probably go on doing it as long as Captain Kirk is in command of the _Enterprise_.”


End file.
